Around Valencia in 48 hours

Ok, before anything else: grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just spent an hour behind the university computer to upload a zillion pictures of last weekend - which was great, by the way, see below - and the computer gave an error and I lost everything - everything! I truly don´t have the patiente right now to upload all those pictures again, so I will do that some other time, but here´s the text:


This weekend my boyfriend Kobe came to visit me again here in Valencia, together with his father and brother. I can’t even begin to describe how good it is to see Kobe again after more than 2 months apart! I won’t bore you with my declarations of love though, and instead tell you what we’ve been up to these last 48 hours! Because 48 hours was the exact duration of their visit, from 3pm, Friday afternoon, until 3 pm this Sunday afternoon, and yet we managed to see all of Valencia’s highlights!

After settling Kobe’s father and brother into a hotel nearby (NH Ciudad de Valencia, they were very satisfied, I’d recommend it were it not for its less than ideal location for a city trip – we chose this hotel because it was near my apartment, which is not at all near the historical city centre, but that aside), we walked to the America’s Cup Port, enjoying the last rays of sun, to see the piers and the miniature sailing boats. Then we took a bus to the city centre and had a refreshing horchata in the Mercado Colón, with a farton to ease the first signs of hunger. Have I told you already what horchata is? It’s a drink very typical of Valencia, made of ‘chufas’, a kind of root that grows in the earth like potatoes, out which a milky fluid is pressed. It tastes a bit like milk with cinnamon and nuts. With a glass of fresh horchata, you eat fartons, which is a typical pastry that you have to dip into the horchata.

They were putting up the Christmas decorations in the Mercado! But apparently they were having some electricity problems, because the lights went on and off. I bet Mercado Colón will be lovely when the decorations are finished! We didn’t linger around to see that though, and proceeded to the city centre for an evening walk. When we arrived on Plaza de Ayuntamiento, we stumbled upon a huge tent with a line of people waiting in front of it. I asked two elderly ladies what they were waiting for, and they told me that inside was a big Christmas stall. So we got in line to see the biggest Christmas stall in Spain, very beautiful and wondrously detailed! A pity we weren’t allowed to take pictures, else I’d show you some of the over 2000 clay figures in the stall!

After a short walk to see Plaza de la Reina and Plaza de la Virgen by night, we had a tapas dinner at restaurant Vintara. I’ve taken about all my visitors there, and should you ever come to Valencia, I recommend it!

On Saturday morning, we got up in time to make the most of the daylight which isn’t as abundant as I thought it would be here in the south. We visited the Mercado Central and bought a kilo and a half of mandarins for little more than a Euro! Mandarins and oranges are Valencia’s agricultural specialty, you see them growing everywhere, even in the city! We also bought Serrano ham and Manchego cheese, also Spanish specialties. What’s great in the Mercado Central is that you can have everything vacuum packed, ideal for aerial transportation. It’s all a matter of combining tradition with excellent customer service.
Afterwards we visited la Lonja, la Plaza Redonda, the Cathedral and the Miguelet tower with it’s magnificent view over the city, the Torres de Serranos… all the faithful blogreaders will know by now what I’m talking about! After a sandwich in the shadow of the cathedral tower – a potato tortilla sandwich or a calamares sandwich in my case – we walked along Turia park, with some pit stops to consume most of the kilo and a half of mandarins we’d bought earlier, and to have some fun making green mandarins dance in fountains… to have a cup of coffee in the Palau de la Musica… and to play on the giant Gulliver! (At least the ones of us that didn’t consider themselves too grown up for that- check the picture!) We walked from the city centre up until the very end of the park near the sea, where Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias is. That’s quite a walk, about 4 kilometres. Added up with some kilometres more in the city centre and the 207 steps of the cathedral tower, we had burned quite some calories in the course of one day! Time to replace those calories with an aperitive on Plaza Negrita and another tapas dinner!
On Sunday morning, we visited the ceramics museum in the palácio del Marqués de Dos Aguas. Unfortunately, the ceramic pieces of Picasso I was so proud to show them were gone to another exposition! We conluded the visit with another fresh horchata and farton in one of the oldest horchaterias in town, the horchateria Santa Catalina. And then it was time to get back to the airport… and that’s how you see Valencia in 48 hours!

After saying goodbye, I went back home, sobbed a bit, had a green tea in my favourite café, and got an invitation from Lena to go to a medieval market in Plaza de Toros. I got quite curious, so I took the metro back to the city centre to explore this medieval market with her. It turned out to be this big event with traditional music, acrobats, belly dancers, fake tortures of fake prisoners (iek!) and lots of little stalls selling things to eat and drink, herbs, spices, jewellery, and so on, and all of that inside the Plaza de Toros, the bullfight arena which I had longed to see from the inside without having to witness an innocent animal getting killed! I had a great pancake with leek, eggs and cheese! I’m going to try to make it myself someday and if it works, I’ll give you the recipe. Anyway, it was great to see Lena and discover this market, to get my mind of the sadness of yet another goodbye – and to conclude a great weekend!

Photos

I´ve logged on to internet in a cybercafé to book a flight home for New Year and I´ll use the opportunity to upload some pictures for you guys! So let me show you some pictures that go with the story of a couple of days ago, which was about last weeked.

Below you see that the mandarines are starting to get orange! There are mandarine trees everywhere in Valencia, really everywhere, and you can just get the fruit right of the trees! The bright light on the picture is the November sun! In the early afternoon, it is still warm enough to walk around in a t-shirt!
This is Ayora park, the cute little park near my home I´ve told you about. And these are two cute little gentlemen walking around in it!More Ayora park...And this is the America´s Cup Port I´ve told you about! The boat you see is the one used for tourist trips around the port. This is the exposition of miniature boats, all the yachts that have won the America´s Cup in the past 200 years. Really beautiful, and probably very exciting for boat fans. This is one of the constructions docks. As I went to the port in the late afternoon, the sun was already quite low, creating this beautiful warm light everywhere.
This is not a miniature! This is a life size boat, of the antique Pirates-of-the-Carribean kind!

And this is one of the docks where they are building the boats that will compete in 2007! When I went to take a peek, the french team was just returning from a practice and they were unloading their boat. I don´t remember which country this black boat is for.




Anyway, so these are some pics of last weekend.. I´ll try to keep you posted, but I´ll be internetless at least until newyear... very inconvenient, but well, I´ll manage. I´m going to go home and cook dinner now, cause I´m starting to get hungry!

Computer rage

Computers: it is a love-hate relationship, but lately hate has been the predominant emotion governing my aura around my laptop. I´ll be short, because if I go into details I´ll explode in another computer-hating-frenzy: it has more or less broken down. It won´t pick up internet. It won´t play any music. From time to time, it just gets stuck. Luckily, Word, Excel and Powerpoint are still working, so in theory I can do all my university work. But not having internet is very annoying. Right now I am writing from the university computer class where they let you have 2 hours of computer time per day. Should be enough to keep you posted on what´s happening around here.

I can´t write much right now though, because Simone, the Italian with whom I am preparing a presentation for class, will be arriving in a few minutes to make the finishing touches on our powerpoint presentation.

About that presentation, here´s another novelty that I´ll also be short about for fear of exploding in a spanish-organisation-hating-frenzy: a professor just changed the deadline of a paper that was normally due mid-december to THIS WEDNESSDAY! There´s a whole story of misunderstandings behind it, but anyway, the consecuence of it all was that I spent all weekend working on this paper+presentation, instead of doing the zillions of other things I had planned to do.

But let´s talk about happy stuff, because I don´t want to re-read my blog in the future and think: wow, I had a horrible time there! Or worse: I´m such a complaining person... :-p

Despite all the work I had this weekend, I did have have some fun by night. On Friday, I went to a party of a Brazilian guy I met a few weeks ago while queueing to enroll in university. I thought I´d only know him there, but it turns out that the world is really small after all, because a lot of people I met in the hostel during my first week in Valencia were there too! And these parties are an excellent way of meeting new people. I got to know another Brazilian named Elio, and a German girl who I actually recognized from class whose name I have forgotten now, shame shame. Then again, I had already had two whisky-colas before meeting her. (By the way, those were all the whisky-colas I had, Mom and Dad!)

On Saturday I went over to Cécile´s apartment around 22h30 to cook a meal together. Absoluty
Spanish eating hours! Her friends Karinn and Emely were also there, and Karinn is a fantastic cook! We had a delicious fish-with-vegetables oven dish and papaya for dessert! Then we watched two episodes of Sex and the City on dvd. Cécile, who is a another university in Valencia, can get all sorts of dvds in the university library for free! I definetely chose the wrong career. Should´ve been an engineer (you´re laughing now, aren´t you, Dad?).

On Sunday afternoon, after another 10 things had gone wrong in less that 15 minutes (I really won´t go into that now, you know, because of the imminent frenzies), I decided I needed to get some air to calm down and I took a walk to Ayora park. It´s a cute little park very close to my home, but I had never been there before! It´s a shame I can´t show you the pictures I made, as I am not working from my own computer... Then I started walking in the direction of the sea, which is were all the people who are starting to gain some sympathy for suiciders go. (For those who might worry, it´s not that bad yet. I can still go work as a bakery shop girl in my home town. I hope.) Anyway, I ended up in the America´s Cup Port. I had never been there before! In 2007 there will be a huge regatta in Valencia, and they are now building new docks for the international teams that will be competing against each other. There is this whole touristic infrastructure around the America´s Cup event! There´s an exposition hall with miniatures of the boats that have won the America´s Cup over the last two centuries, beautiful to see. There´s a restaurant that looks really fancy. And you can take boat tours in the port! For all those who are still coming to visit: I will definetely take you there to see the boats!

Yesterday evening I met Morgane in Café Soret for a fancy chocolate milk creation (which I thought I deserved after all the school work I have done this weekend!).

Allright, and that´s the news!

Gérard Dépardieu in tight jeans

Last weekend was a rather quiet one... I'm finally starting to freak out with school work + thesis + what-the-hell-to-do-about-my-future so I mostly stayed home to do my school work and freak out some more behind my desk until such christian hours as 2am.

On Sunday evening I finally decided it had been enough for the weekend, and I went to the cinema with Lena and her german friend Claudia. But not just any cinema! We went to cinema Rialto, which is in an old theatre in Art Déco style on Plaza de Ayuntamiento, and which only plays old movies, in original version. We had absolutely no idea which movie we were going to see, but we didn't have that much choice, as there is only one room. We saw a French 70's movie called Les Valseuses, with a very young Gérard Dépardieu in very tight jeans! (not looking bad at all!) The movie was... well... interesting. It must have been controversial in its time, and that's all I'll say about it. :-D

Yesterday, Monday, was a most productive day. I went to class at 8:30, had coffee afterwards with Lena and Nynke. Then I studied in the morning sun, on the campus terrace. The November sun, imagine! I had lunch with Nynke and then went to the library and studied until 3:30, when my afternoon class begins. After class I went to check out a hotel for Kobe's parents who are coming next weekend, made a reservation, went grocery shopping and finished reading a chapter for my thesis. I was quite satisfied with myself, I must say.

I hoped today would be just as productive, but I already knew yesterday that productive days only occur once a month, so today was a total distaster when it comes to study efficiency. But I won't bore you with that any longer. It all comes down to: not much news!

Shoes and Valencian Theatre

Yesterday (Friday, that is) after Sevillanasclass I went to the city centre to buy... shoes! Lots of them actually! The first pair I had to get are Sevillanas shoes, the shoes specific for the dance I'm learning. They only sell them in specialized stores, and my teacher had recommended one on the other side of the city, so I took the metro to the centre and set out to explore this new part of town I had never been to before, in search of the store. I ended up discovering a nice part of town, older than the part I live in, with lots of little shops. It was about 5 in the afternoon - the best hour to be in the city, I think, because siësta has just ended, so people are getting out on the street again and shops are opening up. But this time of year, the light is most beautiful at 5: it's the warm light of the end of the day, which vanishes one hour later.

I finally found the store and bought myself a pair of sevillanas shoes. They're not expensive at all - only €14! I figured that to be that cheap, they had to be made in China, but they're not, they're made in Spain! Really puzzling for an international economist (well, economist to be, like me) who has always learned that apparel and shoe industry are a dead end in Europe. How can Spain-made shoes be so cheap? Maybe they make them in Ceuta (the Spanish enclave in Morocco). When I'm a profissioned sevillanas dancer, I'll stimulate the Spanish apparel industry by buying the whole sevillanas outfit, like the ones you can see in the store's showroom!

After buying my sevillanas shoes, I walked back to the city centre, more specifically to Calle Colón where all the shops are. One shoe shop after the other, an absolute paradise for someone who's just got her father permission to use her creditcard to buy a pair of - urgently needed, that is - boots! Funny thing here is that if you want to try on shoes, they make you put on little plastic socks before trying them on. Very hygienic. After a good hour of trying out several pairs of shoes at several stores, I bought a lovely pair of boots, light brown leather, slightly cowboyish, very comfortable! Let's not deny it: shoes make a girl happy!

I went home, made a salad for dinner and showed off all my new shoes to my frowny boyfriend who doesn't get that shoes can make a person so excited. Tsss, boys.

That night I went to the Theatre of Mislata, a small town adjacent to Valencia, to see a theatre piece in which two of Lena's flatmates act. The piece was called 'Ciutat de Cors'. Those of you who speak Spanish will have noted that that is nót Spanish. In fact, it's Valencian, and the whole piece was in Valencian! But as Valencian and Spanish are quite alike, and the actors were very expressive, we understood the whole story. It was an incredibly funny piece and I enjoyed it a lot, even if I didn't understand 100% of what was being said. After the theatre, I had a drink with Lena and her two German friends Claudia and Steffi. Apparently, you can get German beer anywhere! It was a very fun night. To go home, I took the night bus on the Plaza de Ayuntamiento. As I approached the Plaza de Ayuntamiento, I saw the bus was there, so I ran to catch it. But Ayuntamiento is a square paved in marble, lovely to see, but horrible to walk on when it's wet, so I slipped as I ran across a splash of water and sprained my ankle! Luckily, I still caugth the bus, but ouch!

So today I stayed home with my sprained ankle and lovely boots. :-( Well, I had a lot of homework to do, so I had to stay home anyway. I also did my laundry, and here you see it hung out to dry beneath my kitchen window, amidst the palm trees. Very mediterranean, isn't it?

Sunshine and catholic italians

It's incredible how the weather influences a person's mood! Yesterday I saw the sun shining when I woke up and I was instantly happy again. So no more complaining ;-)

Also, less things seem to go wrong when the sun is shining. Before class, I had to go print out anohter small paper I had to write with Lena, and it took only 10 minutes (that's very quick in comparison to the 40 minutes it had taken last time). So I still had half an hour before class started to have a cup of tea on the campus terrace. When the sun is out, it's warm enough to sit outside in a t-shirt again!

During class, we suddenly heard loud music coming in through the windows. Apparently there was a concert on campus yesterday, so we enjoyed live music instead of the professor's vague story about some cooperative I've never heard about. On the picture you see Nynke and Lena, and in the background the artist, who was singing in Valencian, by the way!

After class I had lunch with Lena, the german girl, Nynke, a Dutch girl from Friesland, Martha, an Italian girl and Fatiha (I hope I'm spelling it right), a French girl with a very difficult name to pronounce. A very international table! And we discussed a very international subject... boys! :-D

At 4pm I met Simone, the Italian, to start working on the paper we have to write together. At a certain point, we were discussing religion (and totally not working on the paper) and he told me he was a practising Catholic. He actually goes to church every Sunday! I know it's stupid of me, but it struck me as totally odd that someone my age still goes to church every Sunday. Strange how something that 50 years was the commonest thing in the world, strikes me as odd today.

Anyway, I went to capoeira training and then I still had a class. I was sitting alone, rather in the back of the classroom, because between capoeira and class I have exactly 0 minutes to get from A to B, so I don't have time to shower. I just spray myself abundantly with deodorant and don't sit next to anyone in the following class. :-) After the 10 first minutes, a girl came in and sat next to me. Then suddenly she turned to me and said 'Are you not in my Evaluación Económica Pública class?' I did indeed recognize her from another class, and that's how I met a very nice Spanish girl called Maria José. It was very special for me that she so spontaneously introduced herself, because for an Erasmus student it's not that obvious to get to know Spaniards in class. In a way, that is obvious, because the natives have been in this university for 4 years together, they all know each other and have already formed their groups of friends, so why would they bother in getting to know Erasmus students that leave after a few months? So as an Erasmus student, the bulk of the friends you make here are other Erasmus students. When you meet a nice Spaniard, that's a rather special event. These encounters make my day!

Yesterday evening, for no reason at all I felt quite proud of myself and decided I deserved the night off. I got 2 DVD in the videoteca near my house. (Two, because on Thursdays it's two for the price of one). So I watched 2 movies one after the other, very nivardian! :-)

Oh, I still have to tell you this! My flatmate José went to the market and bought some mandarines because the mandarine season is starting. He bought some, well, 8 kilos! So now we have mandarines for weeks and weeks, mandarines for breakfast, lunch and dinner! Very healthy!

It can't possibly...

This last Tuesday was one of those days on which you think 'It can't possibly get any worse...' more than once per day. Hence, this is the kind of days you perceive as truly distastrous, when you feel at war with the universe and wonder what you've done wrong to be punished by the heavens in such a way...

To begin with, I felt quite literally punished by the heavens when I woke up early on Tuesday morning, because rain was pouring out of the sky again... I wonder why the weather has such an influence on my mood, but I know I'm surely not the only one - 4 years of bakery shop experience will teach you that. The pouring rain was just a forebode for a less than perfect start of the day. I took a shower, that started more or less warm and got colder and colder, until I had to rinse my hair with cold water! I got out of the bathroom, shivering in my towel, only to find out one of the boys had unplugged the boiler the previous night... Grrr! My sympathy towards my flatmates further cooled when I found out they had drunk my pineapple juice, so I had to drink water for breakfast. More grrrr.

I went to class, enduring the rain on the way there. When I sat down and started unpacking my stuff, I reached for my glasses... only to find out I had forgotten them on my desk! And the professor showed a bunch of graphs on slides during the class, which I couldn't see! So between classes I hurried back to my apartment to get my glasses, because without my glasses I'm really worthless (and enduring more rain while hurrying back to my apartment). The second class of the morning went a lot better with glasses, up until the end of the class when the professor said: 'Oh, by the way, some of you don't seem to have understood that you have to prepare a paper due tomorrow on currency boards.' I, poor erasmus student, was among those who had not at all understood that we had to prepare a paper on currency boards for the next day! So instead of doing all the things I had planned for Tuesday afternoon, I spent all afternoon writing the last-minute paper for the next day.

At 7pm, half an hour before my evening class - I skipped capoeira, by the way - I went to a print shop to print the paper I had just written and some slides and other stuff I still needed to print. While sending the documents from the shop computer to the printer, the computer got stuck and had to get fixed, and when I finally got to send the rest of the documents for printing, the printer printed half of the stuff double and the woman behind the counter made me pay for it! As I was already 5 minutes late for class (how can printing possibly take more than half an hour? In Spain it can!) so I didn't discuss, paid for the printouts and hurried to class.

By the time I got to class, I found out that the slides for that class were not among all the stuff I had printed. At the end of the class I was so tired and frustrated that I didn't even hear what the professor was saying so I left early. As I left, it started raining softly. I went to the supermarket to get cornflakes and some other essential foodstuffs and it started raining a little harder. Then I still had to get money from the ATM to pay rent the next day. By the time I left the bank, it was a full-grown rainstorm. I came home SOAKED. 15 minutes later, the rain had stopped. Those were the 15 minutes I had left earlier from class... Talk about godly punishment for skipping 15 minutes of class!

As I awoke today, Wednessday, I really thought it couldn't possibly get any worse than the previous day, but the weather did seem to want to bet on that: this morning, it was not only raining, but there was also lightning and thunder! I almost turned around and stayed in bed, but in the end decided to defy fate and give this day a go anyway. It turned out to be a way better day than Tuesday. The paper I handed and commented on in class was very good according to the professor, I caught up with some reading in the library, went to a presentation of two classmates, had lunch with my Italian classmate Simone, and saw a movie in the afternoon class. The movie thing is less positive than it might appear, because it was dubbed in Spanish, which means I only got 50% of what was being said, and I have to write a comment on the movie, but what the heck! After class I had tea with Lena and we finished our group work for tomorrow. The rest of the evening I spent quietly in my room, reading course notes, cleaning up my stuff...

Anyway, the bottom line is (because I feel I have to give a bottom line in order to finish this post elegantly): things can always get worse, but... I'm still surviving! (That's a horrible bottom line, but I'm too tired to think of anything more philosophical right now...)

Three days of rain (and some strange encounters)

This week I’ve received three visitors: my friends Nivard and Karen, current or former flatmates, and an economics pal, Toon. Always great to receive a visit, especially if they bring gifts from Belgium to remediate any possible homesickness. This means I am now once again very well stocked with Belgian chocolate. :-) Unfortunately, they also brought a Belgian thing I didn’t particularly miss: the weather. Almost as soon as I had picked up Nivard and Karen at the airport, clouds started drifting in, making the sky overcast and grey. Not much later it started to rain… and it never stopped until the last Belgian had left town. NO KIDDING. Belgian just don’t seem to be made for good weather. Lucky I’m half Brazilian, then. :-)

So last Wednessday I took the metro to the airport bus stop to go and pick up my friends at the airport. I sat in the metro, listing to my mp3 player and looking quite uninterested, or at least I think so, when suddenly a woman sat next to me and, out of nowhere, began telling me the story of her life. (She’s a Colombian, who came to Spain because she wanted to get to know Europe and who now works as a cleaning lady and is terribly unhappy and wants to return to her indian village in the Amazon forest where there are pink dolphins.)

Then, when I got out of the metro and was waiting for the airport bus to come, a guy approached me and asked me for a light. I said I didn’t smoke and thus couldn’t offer him a light, after which, out of absolutely nowhere, he declared I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Then he said ‘Look!’ and took of his t-shirt, right there in broad daylight! I gave him the most uninterested glance I could produce (which is quite frosty, several friends will corroborate that) and looked the other way. Without moving a foot, I said ‘Have a nice day’, after which he vanished. Lucky for him, one inch closer and his ability to procreate would by no means be assured.

Fortunately, those were all the strange encounters I have to report. I picked up Nivard and Karen at the airport, and later that afternoon we took a stroll in the city centre, had Agua de Valencia as an aperitif, and then some delicious tapas on the Plaza de la Reina. As my friends were tired from their journey, we decided to defer the heavy duty partying to the next night and watched a DVD at home instead.

On Thursday I had to go to class, as I have written before, so Karen and Nivard visited the Oceanografìc and I met them later with sandwiches for a pick nick. They had bought IMAX tickets for the five o’clock session, so meanwhile we took a walk in Turia park and discovered the Gulliver, which is a giant Gulliver puppet, stretched out on the ground and captured by the Lilliputters, covered in slides for children to play on. For the occasion, we thought we qualified well enough as children!

After that we returned to the IMAX to see ‘The Adventures of Shackleton’, another IMAX movie featuring boats, so I came out completely nauseous again! At that point, it had also started raining, so we walked back to my apartment and went for a beer in my favourite café, café Soret.

We cooked a big pot of pasta at home to save money on eating out, and spent the money we saved on a fancy cocktail in Café de las Letras! :-)

Even though we had heavy-duty-partied the previous night, we got up early on Friday morning to visit the Mercado Central, la Lonja and the Cathedral before Nivard and Karen had to go to the airport to catch their plane back home… I accompanied them to the airport, and on the same plane they took to return to Belgium, a fellow economics student, Toon, arrived for a blitz visit to Valencia. At this point, rain was streaming out of the sky non-stop, but that did not detain us from taking a long walk to the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, through Turia park to the city centre, and back again. (Ok, I’m lying about back again, we took the metro.) We had dinner in a pizzeria near my apartment and a very necessary digestive tea in Café de las Letras.

On Saturday morning, we went back to the city centre in the streaming rain, and visited the Mercado Central, the Plaza Redonda, the Torres de Serranos, barrio El Carmen, and we climbed the Cathedral tower to look upon all that. I was getting really, really, really fed up with the fain, and my shoes were soaked, so we bought take away paella and returned to my apartment to have lunch – dry. After lunch, Toon left to the train station for his next destination – he’s making a whole tour around Spain in only five days.

I stayed home, mainly because all my shoes were wet so I could not go anywhere, and I had to do some homework anyway. Today, Sunday, I also confined myself to my room to work on the terrible mess I call my thesis. At 6 I had tea with Cécile in café Soret, and we rented a movie to see at my apartment.

And that’s what I did this very very long weekend!

Belgian weather

Dear people,

I'm so glad everyone is massively leaving comments on my blog! It makes me very happy to know people actually read it! Thank you all! But one little thing: unless you really insist on it, please don't leave anonymous comments, or at least don't ask me questions in anonymous comments, because then I don't know to whom I have to answer. You can -optionally- fill in your name when you post a comment. For the name to appear, you must select 'other'.

So, to the person who wished me luck with my presentation today, which I suspect was Mom: thanks! I did my best and I think it wasn't bad, though the other presentations were way better... Darn it, I'm only learning here, right?

To the person who said "Do you know many barça players are Brazilians?" I say: indeed! So barça is capable of evoking a mild interest from my part when it comes to football. Seeing Ronaldinho play is fantastic!

To the person who asked me whether I have cut my hair: I have cut it in August, so apparently I haven't seen you since then, but the change wasn't really radical or anything. I'm planning to check out a Spanish hairdresser one of these days too... If I make radical coif changes, I'll take a picture of myself and post it! But if you are referring to the picture on the post, that is not me, but my friend Cécile! (In that case you really haven't seen my in a very long while!)

Yesterday my friends from Leuven, Nivard and Karen, arrived for a three-day visit! Unfortunately, they have brought Belgian weather with them... On the bus to the airport to pick them up, the sun was shining, and on the way back, clouds arrived and when we emerged from the metro, the sky was overcast and grey! This is really not fair: I had been boasting about the great weather here all week and exactly when they arrive, autumn seems to undertake a new attempt to conquer Spanish weather... But well, we'll enjoy ourselves anyway!

So yesterday afternoon we took a stroll in the city centre and I showed them the main monuments and sites. We drank Agua de Valencia, the famous cocktail I have told you about, with orange juice, and ate tapas on Plaza de la Reina. But at 10pm, we were all so tired, well, especially my guests after their journey, that we decided to watch a movie at my apartment. Nivard and Karen, who know I have become a Jane Austen fan after seeing the Pride and Prejudice movie a zillion times (without ever having read a book of hers, shame on me), gave me the dvd of Sense and Sensibility, so my Jane Austen movie collection expands! :-) As we were watching the movie, my flatmates walked by, took one look at the tv screen and rolled with their eyes, sighing... Boys will be boys, eh? But more importantly: girls will we girls and girls like romantic movies set in the 18th century! :-D

Today, I had to go to class, unfortunately, to present the paper I have written with Lena for Economia Social. There was no getting out of it, so I gave Nivard and Karen a map and detailed explanations of how to get to the Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias. They are currently visiting the Oceanographic, the biggest aquarium of Europe, and I'm going to make sandwiches and meet them there for a picknick. Hm, I think the boiled eggs are ready. I have to get going!